SimCity launch shows hardware stupidity

EA games has totally screwed up the launch of Simcity by not having enough servers to run the game properly.

The game has been pulled from sale on Amazon after shedloads of user complaints. Now a the message boards of EA's SimCity studio Maxis indicates that servers are being added soon. The company has not helped its case by adopting the excuse first trademarked by Apple when something goes tits-up by claiming that the problem only effects a “small number of users.” In this case it is most users.

Since Tuesday, EA has pulled the servers offline, promised resolutions on the game's launch page, but still not managed to keep the game running. Part of the problem is that while SimCity has traditionally been a single-player game, the default mode of the new SimCity automatically connects a player's city to those of a handful of other players. This might seem like a good idea, it means that you have to have a network which can cope. EA didn’t. It also attempted to bake anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) into the game which did not help.

All this meant was that EA needed shedloads of bullet proof servers that could handle the traffic and the DRM. It didn’t.